Darcy James Argue shares basics of well-prepared lead sheets, scores, and parts from a jazz/big band perspective — so that you can communicate musical intent in the most clear, familiar, and unambiguous manner.
score
Sibelius 2023.2 advances score subsets and dynamic guitar staves
Sibelius 2023.2 refines score subsets and dynamic guitar staves, allowing them to behave more independently for greater flexibility. Elsewhere, the ManuScript language can export audio in all bit depths and sample rates.
Sibelius 2022.12 is “part”way to more layout independence with score subsets
Sibelius 2022.12 introduces score subsets, which make it possible to have different configurations and layouts of the score, independent of the full score and parts. There are new barline options in this update, too.
A brief history of music notation on computers
Music engraving dates back well before the computer age, but it’s easy to forget that the computer-aided portion of the history spans back a good long time. We summarize that history and explore a few key moments leading up to the present.
Christopher Willis on scoring “The Personal History of David Copperfield”
We have a two-part podcast interview with composer Christopher Willis. We talk with Chris about his score to the movie “The Personal History of David Copperfield” and its fresh take on familiar musical ideas, and break down Chris’s music preparation process on a film from orchestration to copying.
Dorico 3 feature: Condensing
The first in our series exploring the major new features in Dorico 3, condensing is the process of combining the parts of multiple players on a single staff. This is a crucial step in the preparation of usable conductor’s scores because it helps save precious vertical space and improve legibility.
DJA’s Notes: Do not abuse one-bar and two-bar repeats
In this installment of DJA’s Notes by Darcy James Argue, we learn the dos and donts of one- and two-bar repeats, numbering repeated bars, and how to lay out the music correctly so that the intent is clearly conveyed.
DJA’s Notes: Group instruments correctly
DJA’s Notes is a new series inspired by Darcy James Argue’s Facebook posts, which offer some quick, basic steps to improve the appearance of notated music, especially from a jazz/big band perspective. In this post, learn how to group instruments correctly and change what the notation software may do by default.
Musegraph’s Wolfgang font brings the SCORE look to Sibelius
Wolfgang, a font created by Musegraph and derived from the classic SCORE music engraving program, is now available for use in Sibelius.
Open a new window
If you’ve never tried opening a new window in the same document before, you’ll be whistling a new song once you learn how and why to do it, in Sibelius, Finale and MuseScore.